Existing hand gesture detection technologies all have some limitations. For example, some of them require complex and/or expensive equipment, such as depth sensors, stereo cameras, multiple cameras, or infra red cameras. Others perform complicated and expensive computations of image depth data. Some existing technologies only use skin colors, which are not accurate and sometimes cannot distinguish faces or background. Still other existing technologies are limited to only detecting and recognizing a particular hand whose pictures are previously captured and stored by the system while others rely on correlation between a hand and other parts of a body to detect and recognize expected hand gestures. Some existing technologies cannot recognize small hands and can cause speed issues when searching for small hands. Some existing technologies fail to utilize motion information to reduce searches to a small region and thus causes searches slow.
Thus, there is a need to develop a simple single-camera system that can efficiently detect and recognize a hand gesture and overcome the limitations of prior art systems.